Evidence of efficacious, affordable and life-saving interventions may be available but may often not yield the expected outcomes when introduced. How to take interventions of proven efficacy and implement them in the real world to yield the desired outcome is one of the greatest challenges facing the global health community. Issues associated with implementation of interventions commonly emanate from context-specific factors that were not contemplated by policymakers and health system managers (Geerligs et al., 2018). Implementation research assesses such problems or challenges to arrive at a workable solution that would ensure that an intervention yields the desired outcome. 

Evidence-based implementation research underscores the use of best-quality evidence generated from systematically synthesized research studies in addressing implementation challenges to make interventions more effective. 

Implementation research (in health) pertains to the study of clinical and public health policies, programmes, and practices, with the intention of understanding not only what is and is not working, but how and why implementation is going right or wrong, and to test approaches to improve implementation (Peters et al., 2013a). Broadly, it explores the problems that emanate when a new intervention or initiative is operationalized or an existing one is scaled-up. The implementation research process adopts a holistic approach based on systems thinking to provide insights of any aspect on an implementation spanning; factors affecting the implementation, the implementation processes themselves and the results of the implementation under consideration (Brownson et al., 2017).

Implementation research provides valuable insights into the often-complicated interplay between what is feasible in theory and what is actually practical. At the core of implementation research is a multi-disciplinary team that works hand-in-hand with the community in focus to develop strategies grounded in robust/reliable/good quality/rigorous/distilled/systematically synthesized evidence which may simply not be available from narrower research standpoints.

Because of the prime focus on context, well-conducted implementation research affords intervention implementers the capability to foresee and anticipate problems or challenges that may arise along the implementation cascade.